Frontwoman Dee Dee on the music of her life: roller skating along with Tiffany as a kid, learning life lessons from Patti Smith, and falling in love to the Stone Roses.

5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the music that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time. This edition features the 30-year-old leader of hazy guitar rock act Dum Dum Girls, whose third album Too Trueis out now on Sub Pop. Listen along to her picks with this Spotify playlist.

Tiffany: “I Think We’re Alone Now”

In the 80s, we had these things called Pocket Rockers, which were essentially mini cassette players manufactured for kids. They made a bunch of different tapes you could buy, and I had one with Tiffany on the A-side with "I Think We're Alone Now" backed with a great Debbie Gibson song. I was obsessed. I had two other tapes, but they were weird and instrumental. Not pop music. I used to roller skate on my block in East Bay and do little routines with it. I would bring it to school—but I was a really good kid so I only brought mine out at recess—and we’d choreograph dances. These tiny songs were my introduction to the pop world.

Madonna was my first big pop icon. Everything about her was so cool. I was raised Catholic, which was weird. My mom was Catholic and my dad was agnostic, and Catholicism was a really big deal to her even though she was very liberal. I spent maybe the first eight years of my life thinking that everyone went to church. When I was 10 I developed strong friendships with girls who weren’t Catholic—one of them was Mormon, one was Jewish—and I started realizing that it’s a choice.

I really liked the subversive stuff that Madonna would do visually and lyrically. My parents were pretty conservative in terms of looks, but I definitely tried to push the envelope in that direction, as age-appropriately as I could, in middle school. But I also was a goody two-shoes, so I didn't really create any waves. I was into dancing from a really young age—I danced Modern and Jazz for years, and I probably danced to all of the songs off that album.

When my mom was in college, she left Catholicism to be a Hare Krishna for a year and she did lots of drugs then—it’s a bummer that she’s not around now to talk more about that. My parents came to a show at the Fillmore San Francisco in 2007, and we were all just hanging out and getting kinda drunk, walking around, and my mom said: "Oh, wow. I haven't been here in forever. I think the last time I was here I saw Grateful Dead and I was on mescaline." I was like, “What? You've never admitted to smoking weed to me before. How can you drop that bomb on me now?” My parents were about 13 years apart, so my dad was really into what was considered oldies in the 80s, and my mom was into hippie psych-rock and early 70s stuff.

My mom had a very small but well-curated record collection from college that I took over: Beatles, Stones, Janis Joplin, Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane. I really honed in on [Jefferson Airplane’s] Grace Slick. Not only was she really arresting visually and probably my first brunette icon, she was a total power female. I hadn't seen that yet because I was obsessed with these bleach-blond 80s people. I became obsessed with her deep voice and monotone delivery and learned how to mimic it perfectly. I would sing it in the shower every night. I studied every little inflection. My first awful rock'n'roll band covered Jefferson Airplane songs and I got to live out my little Grace Slick dream.

In high school, I thought I was going to go to UCLA to study library science or literature, but my parents took me on a road trip to visit all the UCs, and my grandmother lived in Santa Cruz, so we went to the campus there. I fell in love with it immediately—it's up on a mountain, really secluded. Something about the history of UC Santa Cruz as the alternative UC was intriguing to me. It’s broken up into different schools, and I ended up at the really arty one. I had lived my life to appease my mom, so I hadn’t done a lot of stuff that I wanted to. So when I moved into my dorm room, I was living with a girl who had a massive John Lydon painting and I thought, “This is going to be cool.” The next day she and I and our neighbor went and got pierced—I got my nose done. I didn’t do drugs or drink at all my first year of college, but I went off the deep end a little bit.

That year, my friend at school played me Horses for the first time, and that was the most impactful record that I’ve ever listened to, even to this day. Patti opens the record with the preamble that goes, "Jesus died [for somebody’s sins, but not mine]." That was another Catholic switch that flipped and I was like, "Yes! This is fucking amazing!" It's flawless. It was a huge, huge deal for me. The first song I ever wrote for Dum Dum Girls was "Catholicked", and the choruses of that song are actually the intro Patti did in the "Gloria" cover, which I don't think most people notice. I didn't know too much about the historical context of Patti Smith or her contemporaries, so it was really an out-of-left-field thing for me.

I moved to Southern California in 2005 with my old band, and we opened for [my husband] Brandon [Welchez]’s old band, and that’s how we met. About a year later, we both had super messy breakups with our respective significant others. We re-met and started dating and fell in love over a single weekend. It was pretty intense. While he was on tour he texted me, “Hey, I have to move out of my place. Can I move in with you?” I was like, “Yeah, of course!”

So he brought his 2,000 records to my studio apartment with a Murphy bed. All we had were records. He was was like, "Oh, have you heard Stone Roses?" And I was like, "I don't think so." He has this encyclopedic knowledge of music—he made me a mixtape after we fell in love, and it had “She Bangs the Drums” on it. I loved it. We both became obsessed with that record and listened to it every day for a week. When he went on tour again, I just left it in the record player and listened to it every day for a month. We got married in 2007, only six months after we started dating.

I was super into bands like the Birthday Party when I lived in Santa Cruz in the early 2000s. I’m obsessed with Nick Cave. When I got a bit older, I started listening to the pre-Birthday Party band Boys Next Door, who have this amazing song called "Shivers"—Rowland S. Howard wrote it when he was 16. That turned me onto him not just as an incredible guitar player, but just as a true artist in complete form. Teenage Snuff Film stuck out. It’s really dark, slow, and depressing. He covers Billy Idol and the Shangri-Las. It’s just devastating. On the first song, "Dead Radio", he opens with: “You’re bad for me like cigarettes, but I haven’t sucked up enough of you yet.” When I heard that I was like, “Sign me up.”